One or more aspects relate, in general, to processing within a computing environment, and in particular, to managing use of selected architectural functions within the computing environment.
Computing environments offer a range of capabilities and include certain functions as part of their architectural configurations. One such function is virtual address translation, such as dynamic address translation, used to translate virtual addresses to real addresses.
System configurations include physical memory used to store applications and data. The amount of physical memory is fixed and often inadequate to support the needs of users. Therefore, to provide additional memory or at least the appearance of additional memory, a memory management technique, referred to as virtual memory, is utilized. Virtual memory uses virtual addressing, which provides ranges of addresses that can appear to be much larger than the physical size of main memory.
To access main memory in a system configuration that includes virtual memory, a memory access is requested that includes, for instance, a virtual address. The virtual address is translated using, for instance, dynamic address translation or another translation technique, into a real address used to access the physical memory.